


here to build a house

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Series: tell the wolves I'm coming home [3]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Animal Abuse, Assassins & Hitmen, Canon Het Relationship, Dark, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Manipulation, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Marriage, Non-Graphic Violence, Parents & Children, Workaholic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lawrence Crock loves his girls. He just loves the job a little more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here to build a house

For as long as Lawrence has been alive, he's found purpose in the job. It doesn't matter, particularly, what the job is or who he's working for; Lawrence is the kind of man who is easy with authority, full of initiative and sharp corners. He met his wife on a job--she was young and skinny with terror and the holdovers from the war, because she’d been young when it had ended and it had changed her--and their marriage was a part of the job, the life, for years, an integral thing that was never soft or uncertain.

"We don't have the usual foundations," he told her when she wanted out of the business. But he left anyway, because it was a fight that wasn't worth having. The leaving was important, and enough: another man might have divorced Paula, but Lawrence knew that their life on paper was still important. He'd never have signed that contract if it hadn't been important, and he didn't believe in reneging just because the job took a turn he hadn't expected. 

The girls are another matter entirely; Jade and Artemis never signed anything, but when Lawrence had filled out their birth certificates he’d agreed to the particular profession of fatherhood. 

So: the girls were part of the job, a perk of the job--he could trust both of them, even Jade, to not put a knife in his back, and they could trust him to never hold back. It was sort of surprising that Artemis had never figured out how to use this information against him, but he was also amused. She was probably most like him: fidelity meant a lot to Crocks. When it came down to it, Lawrence would probably never give up on her, either.

He'd had the job first, was all.

*

Paula had never trusted hospitals, which suited Lawrence fine: he didn’t hold with them much himself, no matter how unpleasant field medicine got. He had seen terrible things and figured he’d see more, but it had not prepared him for his wife’s labor.

The first labor—one they never spoke of—was the hardest, and the worst. The baby was stillborn and Paula delivered it five months before it should have been born; even as small as it was, as sad as it was, there was blood. Lawrence sat behind her—held her—as she screamed and wept and raged, and he buried the body, and how was a man supposed to divorce himself from that experience? Lawrence had held men as they were dying, knew what it was like to have blood, even the blood of children on his hands. He didn’t know how to scrub the blood of his child from beneath his nails, and so had washed his hands the way he washed them after any death in which he had been involved. As he had suspected, there wasn’t much of a difference. 

The second labor had produced Jade. In comparison, it was good work, work that Lawrence could be proud of, and hard on himself over: the baby was jaundice and colicky and he loved her hard enough that she would need to grow a thick skin, under which she could hide from the burden of her parentage. Jade did not look like him. When she got older, Lawrence thought she was glad of it. 

He left the baby to Paula and went to work, settling their place in the city well enough that he could afford to hire himself out—Lawrence preferred contract work, it was neater, and had more defined hours. He didn’t care about justice. As the years went by he cared less about anything that didn’t directly relate to a long game and a grand fight; violence lived under his skin and in every muscle. It made little sense to reign it in when the money was so good and the work so suited to every thing he had ever done or seen. Over the years, which now seemed to pass more quickly, he watched as Jade started killing neighborhood animals, her little fingers steadying with each carcass. At last her mother put a stop to it, or at least taught her how to be discreet; Lawrence wasn’t sure how he felt about the action, or if he felt anything about it at all: his daughter had an eye for how to split skin open and fin the nearest, tender bones. It was the first sign he’d noticed in her that reminded him of him. Part of him wanted to offer her a better knife, but another, sager part thought that offering sharp objects to a kindergartener was a good way to spark a home tragedy or a visit from CPS. Lawrence thought the Crock family might get along better flying under the radar, not over. 

Artemis came along during all of this, apparently easier to bear, as Paula had shrugged off the drugs Lawrence had brought her from work and got on to the business of pushing, of giving birth. He had to leave before she’d finished—duty called, and there was a land war in Asia that he was integral to—but his phone got a message from a blocked number as he crossed the international dateline, a weight and a length and a line of text all lowercase reading _she has your hair_. 

The first time he ever held her, she was almost four months old—he’d been away all of that time, settling a matter for the boss, Paula had nearly spit at him when he’d finally walked back through their front door—and Artemis had just gotten the coordination to reach out to him, grasp hold of his fingers and hold on tight. Her eyes were still infantile and dark, shifting and deep. Looking at her was a little like looking down the scope of a rifle: the world settled in and went on around him, but Lawrence sat and held his daughter and thought for a brief and terrible moment that he had perhaps gone soft. She had the look, even as an infant, of someone you found yourself stuck with. 

Paula was by now back on her two feet and Jade was old enough to walk on her own, so sometimes they took her along with on reconnaissance outings—she was excellent cover, especially in their neighborhood—and Artemis, barely fourteen pounds and starting to sleep through the night, went in the sling Paula had made when Jade was born. The sling went around Lawrence, perhaps improbably, but it left Paula’s hands free. Artemis didn’t make it any harder than it had to be: she dug her little nails into the fabric of the sling and the fabric of his shirt and she twisted her bright head around to get a better look at the city as he ran through it, and she didn’t make a sound. If he had been a different man altogether, carrying his daughter like this might have changed him: but he was a sophisticated kind of rough-hewn around the edges, so he just recognized love when he felt it and didn’t give it much more though, not then: he was more focused on the work ahead, the careful accumulation of data that might afford him the opportunity to slit a useless throat later on, so that he would be done with this contract and free to go home and fuck his wife. 

He didn’t think of her behavior then as characteristic, though it would become so, and would make her his favorite: Artemis was a witness, one hundred percent. He isn’t sure if she got that from him or from her mother. 

*

As the years go by, things shake apart: Paula slips on a jump and he stands by and lets it happen, knowing that even if he were the kind of man to reach out and rescue her, it wouldn’t have done a goddamn thing, and the girls are still so young; Jade getting spiteful and sore as a wet cat, and unruly about where she would throw a knife. Lawrence never wants to let on that he knows exactly what kind of damage is being done under his own roof. 

In a lot of ways, for a number of years, Artemis is the only other Crock left, and he doesn’t mind having a legacy. She’s not as mean as Jade and she’s not as steady as Paula, but she is exactly as eager as he was when he was a kid. Lawrence knows she is starved for a little love, so he holds it over her head, high and bright and fine, thinking all the while of the way she clung to him when she was small, her eyes dark even then. She’s still young enough to hope. He’s pretty sure that when Paula comes back from lockup she’ll scare him off for a while, and then Artemis will learn to resent him; she’ll have a chance to let every skill he taught her and ever slight he gave her fester and bruise under her skin. It’s a good skill for her to have, and he knows a thing or two about how to take advantage of a bad situation. 

No one can ever say Lawrence Crock doesn’t want the best for his family. 

*

Sometimes, even after the years have taken their toll and carved out a place on both their skins—looking at Paula is just enough like being slapped and kissed all at once that it makes him catch his breath and let it out again slow. It is ugly and raw and it fucked both of them over. 

Lawrence knows that dying easily is a lie, and his marriage is no exception. They never do get divorced, and he still visits sometimes, late, especially after the girls are gone, Jade like an echo in the dark and Artemis a blazing spark. Lawrence appreciates that in the end the thing between him and Paula isn't anything more surmountable than a mountain in winter: a marriage between two people who were never going to live a spotless life. 

Anyway, the love he has for her won't go down without a fight, and he doesn't see the point in it: she'd bite him if he kissed her and he would still, always, let her. She was not damaged, she was determined. He could use that, had spent years using her weaknesses and her strengths; she suited him. 

The girls, their girls, Lawrence’s own children—they were different, and difficult.

There has never been a clean line between rage and love, not with Lawrence and his daughters.


End file.
